Changing the Grammar of Schooling: An Appraisal and a Research Agenda

In 1994 and 1995, David Tyack, William Tobin, and Larry Cuban (Tyack and Cuban 1995; Tyack andTobin 1994) coined the term “grammar of schooling” to characterize the long-lasting and largely unchanging core elements of schooling. These elements include batch processing of students, separation of classes by academic discipline, age-graded classrooms, teaching as transmission, leveling and tracking, and schooling as a mechanism for sorting students by perceived ability. In recent years, however, there has been a range of efforts that in different ways try to move us away from the century-old grammar of schooling. These include personalized learning, blended schools, competency-based schooling, deeper learning, community-infused and social justice–oriented schools, and many more. Although these developments have been covered in the press, they have not yet been the subject of much serious research that helps us understand how these innovations develop and sustain over time.Most research, both quantitative and qualitative, is conducted within the existing grammar of schooling. We seek to understand what produces achievement gaps among students (Duncan and Murnane 2011; Jencks and Phillips 1998), why schools ask students to suppress rather than reveal their cultural identities (Valenzuela 1999), and why school